Introducing: Special Projects
In October 2024, Integrative Economics celebrated its tenth anniversary as a going concern. We initially launched with a project for the San Francisco Estuary Partnership: an economic analysis of nature-based flood risk management approaches in two Bay Area watersheds.
As we neared the end of that project in late 2016, I recognized that all of the work going into the ecosystem service valuation and benefit-cost analysis was replicable across any number of situations. So we put together a little spreadsheet-based tool and a guidebook that organizations, planning agencies, and even businesses could use to facilitate their own analyses. I wish I had built out the idea starting then.
The traditional management consulting model is well known. Decision makers identify an area of concern, a future challenge or opportunity, or a nagging, pain-in-the-neck, time-consuming process, and hire outside help to take care of it. This model is widely used in the private sector as well as in the government and utilities sectors, This is what I want to help you with. But I want to try doing something a little different.
Many hands make light work
The organizational consulting model needs a major adjustment. Let me offer an example. Company X has identified a problem they'd like to solve, but they don't have the expertise, time, or fortitude to do it themselves. So they hire a consultant who comes in, asks some questions, and puts together a report and maybe a presentation. Then the client takes the report, puts it on a shelf, and never looks at it again. The client just paid for their consultant's continuing education - not a bad deal for the consultant! But if the client really did want to enact some kind of change, they're out of luck as soon as they cut the final check. I aim to help solve this issue with a new service offering: Special Projects.
Special Projects represents a different way of delivering the deep-dive kinds of projects you're already familiar with. The projects that maybe are not necessary for your everyday operations, but without which your organization will stagnate. A feasibility study, traditional market research, regulatory impact analyses, risk assessments, implementing that data dashboard and reporting tool you paid for a year ago - we can do all that. But we are implementing things a little differently: a subscription-based model to help you realize the potential of continuous change management without having to dump five or six figures at a time. This is possible because you (growers, processors, trade groups, nonprofits, and public agencies working in food and environmental systems) share many of the same problems as others in your industry - and rather than leaving you all to yourselves to figure out how to deal with them, we combine and share our collective findings (while preserving your confidentiality and proprietary knowledge).
The key point is that improvement requires practice, an element that is sorely lacking in the traditional consulting model. If you only do something once a year, or heaven forbid, once every five-to-ten years, you forget a lot along the way. Team members move on. The world changes in both subtle and drastic ways: if you completed a study in February 2020, was it even relevant a month later? Our continuous, active knowledge model also introduces something else. In the past, there was a comparative advantage argument to hiring out for special projects: if they were not part of your core operations, then it made sense to turn them over to outsiders while you kept the ship afloat. But I don't think anyone has that luxury anymore: resilience requires us to be prepared - in-house - to adapt to events we cannot control. And that requires practice.
How does it work?
Rather than going all-in on a single, bespoke project, we provide you with a information platform to let you to continuously build on and exercise your knowledge.
Here's how it works:
- You sign up for a recurring subscription
- You gain access to exclusive, early-access data products that show the impacts of events on issues that matter to you: production costs, resource availability, market demand
- You set up an simulation environment that lets you game out different ways events might play out in the days, weeks, and months ahead so you are prepared for contingencies, instead of reacting to them
- You receive timely information that you can easily incorporate into your daily routines so you can keep your reflexes active
We are looking to focus on the following topics for the rollout of Special Projects:
- Anticipating and mitigating the impacts of extreme weather events on your operations
- Estimating the impacts of U.S. import tariffs and potential retaliation from trade partners on farms, processors, and consumer demand
- Maintaining the availability of a capable workforce for field labor and supporting roles in agricultural supply chains
- Technology projects that have the potential to reduce or eliminate duplicative, repetitive reporting tasks
As we learn more about peoples' needs, we may cover additional topics We will be reporting more about these topics in the months and years ahead. In the meantime, if you would like to have early access to the resources, please get in touch or book a call to learn more.
Launching March 2025. Sign up for updates here.